


what never was, i build and seize

by vastlight



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Atsumu Torment, Character Study, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Suna Rintarou-centric, Suna Wins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:02:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28959141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vastlight/pseuds/vastlight
Summary: The way Suna had thought of it is this: he thought he'd understood havingno need for memories.That there had only ever beenhere,and there would only ever benow.Suna receives several unnerving texts, a crimson jersey, and varying tastes of sweetness. Not necessarily in that order.
Relationships: Komori Motoya & Suna Rintarou, Miya Atsumu & Miya Osamu & Suna Rintarou, Miya Osamu/Suna Rintarou
Comments: 11
Kudos: 72





	what never was, i build and seize

**Author's Note:**

> title from yi lei's "thinking"

When Suna gets the notifications, he's sitting with his legs propped up on a bench in the EJP Raijin locker room, killing time before they're due for official warmups.

 **Miya Atsumu**  
You're the worst  
[▶ 3:42]  
And also I hate you

 **Suna Rintarou**  
?  
i'm not listening to that  
dunno what i did but i'd gladly do it again

Suna has heard the inhuman decibel levels piercing through the supposedly soundproof walls. From that, he knows the entourage of circus freaks who have decided to don spandex jerseys and masquerade as a Division 1 V. League team have made their arrival at the stadium. On top of that, he knows _Atsumu,_ okay. On the very best of days, Atsumu is still a pissy drama queen from hell—if he really needed something, Suna knows that he possesses none of the tact and shame that would deter a normal person from barging into the opposing team's locker room at an away game.

So he doesn't think much more of it. Exiting out of the conversation, he goes back to lazily flipping through the apps he has open on his phone without really looking at any of them. Picks some lint off his towel and balls them up to periodically chuck at Komori. Gleefully dodges the retaliating slap-fight. Routine so familiar it's on the verge of being canonized as ritual. 

In fact, by the time the door swings open the next time to reveal their long-suffering captain, he'd casted the messages of unprovoked hostility entirely to the back of his mind. 

"O captain, dear captain," he singsongs, swinging his legs down to the floor. "What have you procured for us today?"

"There's a new regular caterer," replies Asada, setting his findings down on an empty bench in the centre. Suna's gaze shifts from the semi-transparent plastic bags to the saran-wrapped onigiri to the packaged umeboshi to the simplistic, monochrome kanji logo uniformly sported by all of the above.

Miya.

As his teammates swarm their captain with the allure of food, he distantly hears Washio saying something to the room at large about how his girlfriend _loves_ their tuna mayo, she said we all _must_ try it.

From where he'd shoved it into the pocket of his track jacket earlier, Suna feels his phone buzz with an angry string of incoming notifications. He locks the screen again, but it keeps lighting up again with new texts. _Shit,_ thinks Suna, in a renewed sense of bemused curiosity. _Fuck you,_ reads his phone. 

—

"Shit," Suna says aloud to Komori in the locker room, after. "Do I have to?"

Proportionally speaking to the volume they take up on his face, Komori's eyebrows wield far too much judgmental power. His hair, too, though Suna's trepidation is owed largely to Komori's propensity to shaking off the water from his hair after post-game showers like he's never heard of a towel, bearing uncanny resemblance to a miserable, wet dog.

Suna's luck with teammates who don't actively venture to make his life difficult is, as has been the observed trend, abysmal.

"Okay." Suna tries again, doing his best to cultivate a respectable distance between Komori that puts himself outside of his potential fire radius when he decides to shake off the water droplets. "Rephrasing. Coach can't _actually_ do anything to me if I'm not there. Right?"

Komori's eyebrows are incredulous now. Suna hates being able to read the status of Komori's eyebrows. "Suna, you know as well as I do that we have to be at sponsored events."

"Obviously I know that, which is why I'm no longer asking if I have to be there. I'm asking how realistically bad it would be if I _wasn't."_

"You're not making any sense," Komori says mildly, reaching into his locker.

On principle, Suna doesn't beg, but he does look appropriately pleadingly at Komori for a few extended seconds, to, if not appeal to his conscience, then at least unnerve him into submission. 

Finally, Komori sighs. Victory is near. "I'll stick close by," he concedes, "and I'll cover for you if you want to dip early. But you have to be there at least when we all first arrive." Suna would thank him for his oh-so-gracious benevolence, but Komori promptly proceeds to flip his hair upside down to towel it dry, thoroughly drenching Suna in an unsolicited second shower.

—

On the subject of humility, Suna can graciously admit to absolutely not being enlightened enough of a person to rise above the simple pleasures of gloating, nor is he above being a generally obnoxious sore winner. If he has to be here, then he finds no shame in the silver lining of taunting Atsumu right in his smarmy face. 

Unfortunately, not even Atsumu seems to be rising to the bait like normal, offering him an actual sincere congratulations on EJP's victory with none of the unprovoked spite and rage characteristic of the Miya Atsumu in Suna's LINE message history.

He briefly allows himself a moment to wonder if there had actually been a hidden, normal Miya triplet all this time, biding his time in the shadows before finally being unleashed into society at the age of twenty-two to replace his early primate of a brother.

"'Course we're gonna lose sometimes," says Factory Replacement Atsumu, holding a flute of champagne. "You just go on and enjoy yer win while it lasts, though, Sunarin." 

"Right," says Suna. "Of course. Wow. My bad for being unsportsmanlike, then, Atsumu the Kind."

"It's okay," Atsumu accepts this with a serious nod, placing a hand on Suna's arm. Clapping him once on the back, he's then being escorted away by Inunaki so the Black Jackals can go in a circle and slap each other's asses in melancholy reflective ritual or whatever, Suna doesn't know. He watches them leave and concludes that the very idea of Atsumu being a semi-civilized human being may just be making him sick.

"What the fuck is his deal," Suna says to Komori, who just shrugs. "Man, he seriously creeps me out."

"I'm not really s'posed to say this," comes a voice from behind him, and Suna immediately feels every single muscle in his body tense and engage, ready to set a new Guinness world record for the hundred-meter dash on his way out of the door. Komori, the traitor and the liar, grabs onto his arm before steering them both around. "But I've never in my life done anything 'Tsumu told me to, and I won't start today."

"Osamu-san!" Komori beams, the traitor and the liar, his grip making dents in Suna's arm. Suna doesn't know how he even manages to play volleyball with those retractable talons he calls fingernails. "It's been a while, hasn't it!"

"Hey, Komori. Suna," says Miya Osamu, leaning against the door frame and crossing his legs, blockading Suna's escape route. He didn't want it to have to get to this point, but Suna ruefully thinks he may just have to learn how to scale down buildings on the fly. "The Jackals held tryouts last week, 'n the decision's just been finalized after the match. 'Tsumu's been skippin' all over the place 'cause Hinata Shouyou's finally come back from Brazil," he says, snorting.

"He's still on that?" Suna blurts out before he can help himself, because it took a moment for him to even place the name Hinata with Karasuno's tiny, springy redhead from their last two years of high school. 

"Yer tellin' me," says Osamu, crossing his arms. 

"Oh, would you look at that! Seems like my cousin needs me over there. Well then, I'll just leave you two gentlemen to it," says Komori, the traitor and the liar. Sakusa is nowhere to even be seen. Suna tries his very best to translate the words _Your death will be slow and painful_ into a single, compact glare. Komori doesn't even spare him a glance, and goes over to join Washio and his girlfriend at the refreshments table. 

"Well," Suna says after a fraught few seconds of silence. "Seems like I'm being called away from your dear company by Person over there, for Reason. Excuse me." He downs his own glass of champagne before pushing past Osamu out of the door. It tastes like ash in his mouth.

—

"Suna."

"No."

"Sunarin."

"I'm busy."

"I'm sitting right next to ya, and I can see ya losing at Tetris."

"Busy."

"You're losin'."

"Touch me and you will die a gruesome and grotesque death within seven days," Suna threatened balefully without looking up.

For one brief, glorious moment of reprieve, he was granted both the long I-shaped Tetris block and the luxury of no new noises coming out of Miya Atsumu's mouth. Suna twisted in his seat to evade his incoming dirty paws. "That includes my phone."

"Whatever," Atsumu had grumbled, shifting away from where he's pathetically sprawled on the desk, vaguely in Suna's direction to pathetically sprawl vaguely in Osamu's direction instead.

Suna managed to beat his own high score before accidentally misplacing an L-shaped block and promptly giving up. Atsumu pilfered a pencil from Suna's deskmate whose seat he was currently occupying, and aimed to jab the newly-sharpened tip viciously at his brother's arm. Osamu rolled out of its way easily without looking. 

The analog clock hanging on the wall next to the classroom's door frame indicated about five minutes before the lunch period ended and Atsumu had to go back to his own class. Osamu was already well into his mandatory post-meal hibernation period, but Atsumu grabbed him roughly by the shoulder of his blazer and shook. "'Samu.'' 

_"What,"_ Osamu grunted.

"Look at this." Atsumu angled his phone so Osamu could squint at the cracked fragmentation he calls his phone screen.

"'Miracle Fruit Tablet, transform flavour of food,'" read Osamu. "Atsumu, what?"

"Kosaku said his brother ate a whole lemon and said it tasted like a fuckin' orange because it completely messes with yer tastebuds, can ya believe that?"

"What's that gotta do with me, idiot?"

"I wanna try, too!"

"Whaddaya need that shit for?"

Atsumu huffed and aimed a kick at his brother's shin under the desk. Suna thought his eight-year-old sister might have been less easily provoked than him. "It's _science_ , 'Samu, dontcha think it's cool?"

Osamu snorted. "I like my tastebuds just fine the way they are, thanks. Though I s'pose you _would_ need scientific intervention to fix yours."

Suna slinked further down in his seat and tried to tune out the rest of their argument. A completely pointless one, in his opinion, because regardless of what Osamu ended up saying, Suna knew Atsumu would steal some of his allowance and retroactively rope him into it anyway. He also knew that Osamu, also knowing this, would still venture to make no particular extra preventative measures towards this end. 

By the time Osamu finally hissed out a, "Fine," barely audible over the shrill ring of the school bell, it was all Suna could do to keep himself from rolling his eyes. The twins invited themselves into his house the following Sunday and offered him both a tablet and a drink of vinegar. From his own pantry.

"I dunno," he said thoughtfully after obnoxiously smacking his lips a couple times just to piss Atsumu off. "It's cool that it's sweet now, but, like. I could've just had soda."

The artificially saccharine flavour did nothing to mask the acidic feel burning its way through his throat. Like he said. Pointless. 

—

In mid-October, the MSBY Black Jackals play the Tachibana Red Falcons at their home stadium. The weekend coincides with a brief break in EJP Raijin's training schedule, so Komori, the liar, the traitor, and the meddler, takes it upon himself to book two tickets on the Shinkansen out to Osaka.

"Sorry, can't go," Suna says. "I've got a work thing."

"We have the same job, Suna, can't you try even a little bit to make it believable?"

"Sorry, can't go," he amends. "I don't want to."

"Better. Still, too bad."

"Komori, there's nothing I want less than to waste my weekend off rooting for Atsumu and your cousin. I mean this."

"I'm not just rooting for Kiyoomi, either, I'll root for whoever I think can win."

Suna switches tactics and doesn't say a word. Maybe if he plays obtuse, Komori will go away and bother their new doe-eyed outside hitter instead.

"It's been a while since you've seen Ojiro-san, hasn't it," says Komori mildly.

"Ugh," says Suna, and knows that Komori knows what it means. A few minutes later, his phone rings with a text with all the information.

 _"Ugh,"_ he calls out again, louder and in the direction of Komori's locker. Komori doesn't even look at him.

—

"Honestly, don't we have any insider privileges that we could have abused? Why did we sit so high up?" Suna complains through his mask. It doesn't do much by way of preventing recognition—throughout the course of the game, he and Komori had signed plenty of autographs and received altogether too many selfie requests.

The crowd had mostly thinned out since the Falcons took the final set an hour ago, and Komori finally gets up to stretch his legs. "You liked the aerial view."

"Yeah, and that was before I had to walk back down all these stairs."

"Are you a professional athlete or not?"

"I'm a professional at volleyball, not at walking down stairs."

Komori rolls his eyes and ushers Suna along, steering him by the shoulder blades until they're shuffling out of the emptying stadium and into the nearby bar that Aran had texted to him earlier in the day. The first one to spot them is Bokuto, who waves them over to the cluster of tables haphazardly pushed together to accommodate the group of twenty-some athletes so enthusiastically he almost knocks over a passing waitress before Inunaki impatiently tugs him down again.

"Good game," Komori nods at Atsumu.

"I was cheering for Aran the entire time," Suna tells him, brandishing like a weapon a heart-shaped uchiwa he'd purchased on a whim outside the venue that bears the kanji for 'Ojiro' in glittery red letters. "Good game, Aran-san."

Atsumu scowls and slides down further in his seat, and Aran rolls his eyes fondly at them both.

"Play nice, Suna," chides a smooth, amused voice from behind him.

"Kita-san!" Suna exclaims, snapping to attention and whipping around to see his old captain holding his drink. Ignoring Atsumu's low snickers, he subconsciously straightens up a little, then drops his shoulders because he isn't emotionally primed to deal with the full gap in height tonight. "I didn't know you made it, too."

"We wrapped up everythin' we needed to for harvest season last week, so I took this weekend off to drive out. I wouldn't've missed this match for the world, though," says Kita, sliding into the booth and casting a soft smile over in Aran and Atsumu's direction. Atsumu positively _preens_.

Suna gags a little in his mouth, and shuffles in after Kita. "Kita-san showed up for me 'n Aran-kun's match and not yers," taunts Atsumu in a singsong voice, and his yelp from the full colliding force of Suna's boot against his shin in tandem with the sound of Aran's long-suffering sigh and Kita's laugh. At once, Suna feels fifteen.

—

At the tail-end and highlight of his middle school volleyball career, Suna's team had made it to the All-Japan Athletic Tournament as Aichi Prefecture representative. Gradually throughout the months leading up to the tournament, he'd been building up the core strength required to widen his quick attack's potential contact point. Honing his instincts through meticulous observation, systematically laying out his traps for the opposing blockers like a predator pouncing from the shadows.

They'd made it respectably to the quarter-finals before eventually losing in the third set to a team that would become a finalist. But Suna, of course, liked to win.

Climbing into the seat in the back row of their team bus and squishing himself to the window before any of his teammates got a chance, Suna closed his eyes. From where he'd stuffed his hands into the pockets of his team jacket, he clutched tightly onto the business card from a heavily accented coach.

It continued to burn a hole in his pocket throughout the standardized cool-down speech from Coach at the inn, the entire bus ride back to school the next morning, the subsequent walk back home to his parents and sister, all the way until he trudged to his room and dug it back out from his jacket, already creased and worn. He'd come representing a powerhouse team based in Amagasaki, he'd said. _I know it's a lot to consider, but we think you'd be a fine addition to our team. Give it a coupla weeks to think it over, and give us a call,_ the coach had said as he left with a wave. 

All Suna had done at the time was give a noncommittal shrug and a polite bow, but as he collapsed onto his desk, he thought back to the tournament brackets, printed neatly on the whiteboards near the gymnasium's main staircase. Yako Junior High, hailing from Hyogo garbed in an obnoxious fluorescent yellow. To the Miya brothers, who Suna learned had been racking up a storm all over the Kansai region with their almost mechanically-precise matchups. To the tournaments from the years past, the force and deadly accuracy of Ojiro Aran's hits like an act of consecration on the court. Their recent visits to the Interhighs and Spring Nationals. 

"Oh, what the hell," he said aloud, and swivelled around in his chair to open up a new search tab on his old computer.

Inarizaki High. If their reputation didn't already precede them, then the following winter Suna would certainly take it upon himself that it would roll in alongside his arrival at Amagasaki Station.

—

A couple of hours later, Suna's quite a little bit tipsy. He has allowed himself to be roped into a high-stakes arm wrestling tournament by Atsumu and the Falcons' setter, their respective teams' 'honour' on the line. He's just smugly slammed Atsumu's fist down on the table to popular uproar when a bored voice speaks up from behind.

"Lame," says Osamu, still clad in his Onigiri Miya cap, sliding into an open seat next to Aran. (Suna needs to start interrogating his old teammates' proclivity for just emerging from behind his back in alcoholic contexts. He's half-convinced Akagi will materialize at any moment to offer him a piña colada.)

"And now here comes 'Samu," bemoans his very drunk brother. "As if my day ain't already shitty enough!"

"Shut up," says Osamu, without any heat. "Sorry I'm late, I had to wrap things up at the restaurant before I came here."

"Hello, Osamu," greets Kita. "How's business goin' for ya?"

"It's goin' well," he sighs, unzipping his jacket and draping it across his seat. Suna's vision blurs for a while before zooming back in with a hyper focus. "We got a good crowd at the game, I just had to run back after I finished at the stadium to close."

"Is that my jersey?" asks Aran, squinting in Osamu's direction.

"'Tsumu's been tryin' get me to wear his to a match since it went on sale," says Osamu, grinning and twisting around to show 'OJIRO' written in the back. "Told him I'm not meant to be endorsin' anybody as the official caterer."

"I'm yer brother!"

"Everybody can tell just by lookin' that I'm yer brother, idiot," says Osamu, folding his hands underneath his chin. "Folks think I'm you at every game. Anythin' more and I'd be accused of nepotism."

"Yer literally wearin' Aran-kun's number right now, and three weeks ago you were wearin' Sunarin's, and you've got one of everyone on my team except me!"

Suna turns to fix Osamu with a stare. "You have my jersey?" Osamu half-shrugs with a lift of his left shoulder before he's approached by a passing bartender about his order.

Suna leans in to hiss in Atsumu's ear, "Is _that_ why you were blowing up my phone at the game?"

"I thought you had planned to be gangin' up on me 'cause yer both pieces of shit," he wails. "Turns out yer just pieces of shit _independently_ , and also so goddamn _stupid."_

"Keep your voice down," Suna hisses again. "What the hell do you mean?"

"I'm not tellin' you, piece of shit #2," he says, childishly petulant. Suna sighs. "I'm not tellin' you, but if the two of ya don't have some typa talk soon then I'm gonna kick both yer asses."

"I'd like to see you try," sneers Suna, whacking him up the side of the head.

—

The way Suna had thought of it is this: he thought he had understood having _no need for memories._ That there had only ever been _here,_ and there would only ever be _now._

Here, he'd recited to himself underneath the harsh fluorescent glare of the Inarizaki gym lights, observing the whole width of the court as the twins wrestled with their future. Atsumu screaming at Osamu about _happiness,_ because there, on their shared court, it had hit them all, truly, that there wasn't a single thing that Osamu had ever done that Atsumu hadn't. 

Now, he thinks, staring at the EJP contract laid out on the table.

(Suna reminded himself that he'd always loved volleyball, for the satisfying smack of the ball against his palm followed by the _bam_ when it slams against the linoleum floor. The helpless, frustrated scowl on his opponents' face when he twisted them right into his trap. The first game he'd won on the starting roster. The contentment he'd felt settle deep into his bones, when he'd been made an offer at a nationwide powerhouse.

It was easy to forget the reasons why whenever training became arduous and dull, but when he shot sideways glances at Osamu during conditioning, the lines of his back when he and Atsumu raced each other to their limits, Suna thinks he can finally see, that he'd learned to love the in-between just as much as the exhilaration of victory, like the muted contentment of the first time he walked off the platform at Amagasaki Station with his suitcase and life in tow, the first day that he'd been led straight through the gates of Inarizaki to his Class 1 homeroom. 

The easy-to-remember facts: Suna was scouted for volleyball. He loved it with all he was, including all the things it's done for him. His heart had been set on it since before he moved to Hyogo, since his last middle school tournament, the thrill of recognition. He had no backup. He had no other option but to see this through.)

—

(It had barely been three years of Suna's time, a brief punctuation of what he knew would be a long career to come, as opposed to a lifetime laid out from the beginning in portions of two. By any metric, it would have been ridiculous to lay claim to that for himself. Still, he'd found himself empathizing, just a little, with the reluctance to let go.)

Here, and now.

Right?

—

Suna thinks he must have lost his goddamn mind. Maybe he'd taken one too many volleyballs to the face during his lifetime as a middle blocker, and Washio's spike last week had been the final straw. Maybe he'd suffered permanent brain damage from the crimes of consuming alcohol during V. League season.

"Fuck," he says aloud, bracing himself to enter. A passing mother levels him with an icy glare and pulls her toddler child closer to her side.

He pushes the door open to a quaint establishment tucked into the heart of Osaka city, simple and homely. Suna feels a wave of emotion threaten to seize him when he's thrown back into lazy sun-drenched afternoons in the Miya kitchen from a lifetime ago, so he mutters, "Fuck," under his breath once again.

"Irasshaimase," drones the bored teenager manning the cashier, and Suna almost turns back on his heel directly onboard the next scheduled train back to Shizuoka before Osamu pokes his head through the curtains and pauses. "Sunarin."

"Hey." He cracks a grin. "I'm trying to lodge a complaint. Can I speak to your manager?"

It startles a laugh out of Osamu. "Dunno if he's in," he says. "Why don't you come to the back, and I'll see what I can do."

"Ominous," comments Suna dryly, but trudges behind Osamu out through a back door he hadn't noticed upon first glance.

There are so many things he could say to Osamu, things they'd left hanging in the chasm between spending almost every waking hour by each other's side and the ensuing disconcerting divergence, the limbo they'd let germinate into radio silence. Osamu takes off his cap and places it on a counter behind him, before crossing his arms and looking up into Suna's eyes.

Standing here now, looking at the familiar outline in the shape of Osamu, Suna settles on, "You… dyed your hair back."

"Ah, this?" Osamu runs a hand through his newly-dark hair, shorter than Suna had ever seen it in high school. Suna thinks he really needs to find better gratuitously shitty entertainment to pass the time than shitty nighttime makeover shows, because his brain is suddenly inundated with phrases like _charming_ and _chic_ and _really brings out your eyes._ Ugh. "It's actually all natural now. I waited to grow it out, then I chopped it all off. Shoulda seen me three weeks ago. _Real_ sight for sore eyes."

The summer of their second year, Osamu and Atsumu had dragged Suna over to their house, spurred on by Akagi's throwaway comment during one Saturday morning practice that it was still sometimes hard to immediately tell them apart on the court, even with numbered jerseys. Suna had been less than inclined to spend upwards of five hours in a cramped bathroom with the twins, but the bribery of Osamu's endless snack arsenal had managed to win in the end. 

The bleach was a long, arduous process, and it smelled like shit. 

Suna had thought, back then, looking over at the brothers once again sporting identical shades of rust after the first round of bleach, that surely there existed more efficient ways to demarcate one twin from another. For one, they definitely didn't _both_ need to sentence themselves to potential death via hydrogen peroxide mishandling. For another, they both still _styled_ their hair the exact same way. If it wasn't Atsumu-and-Osamu, then it would be Osamu-not-Atsumu, and Atsumu-not-Osamu.

"While you're at it, you should get a nose job, too," Suna had told Atsumu, just because he could, tapping a finger on his chin in a mockery of thoughtfulness. 

"What the fuck?" 

"If you really want to make it obvious, I mean."

"Why me then? Why not 'Samu?!"

"Yeah, but I don't _need_ one," Osamu had joined it, grinning. Suna nodded solemnly in agreement. 

"We have the same face!"

"Then why are _you_ the one who needs a rhinoplasty?"

"Shut yer ugly trap!"

 _"We have the same face,"_ Osamu had mocked back then. And if it wasn't Atsumu-and-Osamu, then it would be Osamu-not-Atsumu and Atsumu-not-Osamu. Here, now, in the low light of Onigiri Miya, clearly crystallized, Suna can see that it's just Osamu.

"I'll bet," he says, in complete sincerity for once, and smiles. "It looks good. It looks good on you, Osamu."

—

When V. League season draws to a close the following April, Suna's sitting in his apartment watching, unfortunately, more shitty nighttime makeover shows, when he gets an email from his manager that he's been called for national team tryouts. When, as the sakura flowers begin to blossom all around Tokyo a few weeks later, he receives his own crimson jersey after training, it's his sister that he calls first. 

"Yellow, red… You're so close to getting all the primary colours, you're more than halfway there."

"Whatever," says Suna into his phone.

"No, it's okay, nii-san. One day you'll finally get to the blue, probably. I believe in you," she says solemnly, and Suna hangs up to the sound of her cackling laughter when he pushes the door open to the Tokyo branch of Onigiri Miya, still in preparation for its grand opening in a month's time. Sourly, his mind recalls the maroon track jacket back at his apartment, its colour beginning to fade from wash, and Suna thinks he's been working in shades of red for a very long time.

Osamu's crouched in a spot of sunlight filtering through the window and fiddling with an order of kitchen supplies that had just come in, individually inspecting the contents when he hears the door swing shut behind Suna and looks up. "Hey," he grins, straightening up. "You're early today."

Suna reaches into his duffel bag and pulls out the crumpled jersey. "Olympian privileges, I guess." Osamu swears under his breath before setting down the box and getting up.

"Lemme see that." He lets out a breath when he turns the fabric over in his fingers, before looking up and meeting Suna's eye. "Wow. Olympian like you got any other privileges you can think of?"

"Easy there, tiger, not the money-maker," Suna taunts, placing a finger on Osamu's lips when he crowds him up against the wall.

Osamu says in a deceptively smooth voice, "Well, you're supposed to play volleyball with any part of your body other than yer face," and leans in to close the gap. He tastes, oddly, of the rare, overpowering saccharine that Suna had found on the detour from the acetic to the sweet.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry for taking my own jokes seriously enough to write 5k words of a character study around them. as if its my fault.


End file.
